Number of the Month

November 2006

Who really wrote Stern?

Correspondence received from
inveterate number watcher, Dennis Ambler:

As I suspected, Tyndall had a major input into the Stern Report, even having
a "researcher" seconded to the Stern team for a year. This
was the Tyndall submission and below are their inputs, including direct
editing of the final report by Tyndall staff.

Tyndall researchers have made major contributions to the Stern Review.
Dr Simon Dietz completed a year-long secondment to the Review
team in partnership with
Tyndall, made possible by the UK’s Economic and Social Research Funding
Council (ESRC).
Tyndall submitted 27 pages of evidence from across a range of its
researchers and collaborating Universities. A number were then invited to
give direct oral evidencewww.tyndall.ac.uk/publications/stern_review.pdf

Anthoff, D., Nicholls, R.J., Tol, R.S.J. and Vafeidis, A.T. (2006) Global
and
regional exposure to large rises in sea-level: a sensitivity analysis.
Research
Report Prepared for the Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change.
Tyndall
Working Paper 96http://www.tyndall.ac.uk/publications/working_papers/twp96.pdf

6) Terry Barker, leader of Tyndall’s CIAS programme of research
(Community
Integrated Assessment System) and Director of 4CMR, set up a project to
conduct a
meta-analysis of the literature on the costs of Greenhouse Gas (GHG)
mitigation with
induced technological change, funded by HM Treasury. This generated a
report for
the Stern Review: 'A meta-analysis of literature estimates of the costs of
GHG
mitigation with induced technological change’.http://www.landecon.cam.ac.uk/new_le_website/research/eeprg/4cmr/news.htm

A Tyndall Briefing Note from April 2005 is available on Terry Barker’s
area of Tyndall
Centre research, called ‘New Lessons for Technology Policy and Climate
Change. Investment for Innovation; a briefing document for
policymakers’:

4CMR’s Director, Terry Barker, set up a project to conduct a
meta-analysis of the literature on the costs of Greenhouse Gas (GHG)
mitigation with induced technological change, funded by HM Treasury,
employing Mahvash Qureshi for three months' full-time- equivalent research
assistance, with help from 4CMR staff. Katie Jenkins assisted and Terry
and Jonathan Kohler supervised. This generated a report for the Review:

'A meta-analysis of literature estimates of the costs of GHG mitigation
with induced technological change'.

They have of course opened yet another Climate "Research
Centre", another example of creating consensus by setting up
new bodies but with the same people involved. This closed network is
huge and growing.

Government Scientist opens Climate Change Centre January 2006

Sir David King, Chief Scientific Advisor to HM Government, was in
Cambridge on Friday for the official opening if the Cambridge Centre for
Climate Change Mitigation Research in the University’s Department of
Land Economy, or ‘4CMR’ as it will be known.

"Climate change is occurring and the causal link to increased
greenhouse gas emissions largely caused by the use of fossil fuels is now
well established. Carbon dioxide levels are now about 40% higher than at
any time in the past 740,000 years at least. The inertia of the global
weather system means further warming will occur over the next few decades
regardless of action on emissions reduction. As a result, millions of
people around the world will increasingly be exposed to hunger, drought,
flooding and other serious impacts."

The Daily Telegraph print edition of today has a page width photograph
of Stourhead. The caption reads:

The gardens at Stourhead, Wiltshire, are a stunning example of the effect
of this year's climatic conditions. A warm, dry start to the summer created more
starch in the leaves, which has meant better colours and the wet August.

When they say climatic they mean weather.Your bending author happened to be at Stourhead (our local park) a year ago
(October 27th) with a digital camera. Here are a few snaps. Click for full size.
Anyway, why should that
fellow in the castle have the monopoly of Wiltshire pictures?

04/11/06

Breakthrough!

Just at our darkest hour, when the new godless religion
seemed to be sweeping all before it, a major newspaper has produced a two-page
broadsheet article telling the truth about the global warming hoax. It is, of
course the Daily Telegraph and the
article is:

Not only does he debunk the claims of the congenitally
fraudulent UN IPCC (many of us have done that) he details how the conspiracy was
penetrated.

Next, the UN abolished the medieval
warm period (the global warming at the end of the First Millennium AD). In 1995,
David Deming, a geoscientist at the
University
of
Oklahoma
, had written an article reconstructing 150 years of North American temperatures
from borehole data. He later wrote: "With the publication of the article in
Science, I gained significant credibility in the community of scientists working
on climate change. They thought I was one of them, someone who would pervert
science in the service of social and political causes. One of them let his guard
down. A major person working in the area of climate change and global warming
sent me an astonishing email that said: 'We have to get rid of the Medieval Warm
Period.' "

Furthermore, he
appends a
pdf document with his references and calculations, making the whole exercise
a triumph of reason over prejudice. No doubt Viscount Monckton is in line for the
usual character assassination that follows telling the truth about the
scaremongers.

And there’s more

This from Peter Hitchens in the Mail on Sunday. It did not
seem to have made their web site, so here is a scan of it.

5/11/06

Noises off

I did but prompt the age to
quit their clogs

By the known rules of ancient
liberty,

When straight a barbarous noise
environs me

Of owls and cuckoos, asses, apes
and dogs:
Milton, Sonnet XII

Your bending author (who is not a member of any political
party) gave a talk on the tenth of the month to a UKIP meeting in
Dorchester
on the subject of Science at bay. It turned out to be unexpectedly stimulating. Now
that the Conservative Party has closed its collective mind following the Green
coup, UKIP is the only party still in listening mode. The audience were
appreciative and unfazed by politically incorrect truths.

It was also a pleasure to meet the new party leader, Nigel
Farage, a rarity among politicians, who tells it how it is and not how he
imagines you want to hear it. A Green Curtain has descended across British
politics, behind which real debate is no longer encouraged.

One of the brave souls who defy the commissars of political
correctness is Christopher Monckton, whose diatribe
part two is published in the Sunday
Telegraph. Nothing much to argue with in that, though this paragraph struck
an odd note:

In that context, the few femtowatts
you will save by not leaving your television on standby don't matter. It is not
that energy efficiency, renewables and recycling will not make enough
difference. They will hardly make any.

It’s true that they don’t matter, but to one who has
worked on microwatt sensor systems powered by light it seems remarkable that
anyone should bother to try to reduce the power so far, and it is energy rather
than power that is the crux of the argument. As your bending author remarked in another
place, the telling phrase ‘lost in the noise’ has simply got lost in the
noise. Even a watt is hardly going to keep your big toe warm, let alone bring a
catastrophic end to civilisation.

Funny old world.

PS things are still a bit chaotic at Numeric Towers,
following the illness of people and computers, and the backlog of e-mails
requiring reply is growing rather than shrinking. Especial apologies are
due to those who have generously given real support. With any luck we will catch
up soon.

This week we had one
quotation from The Great Leader that sums up the total vacuity of his
approach to life, the universe and everything, “We need celebrity scientists
to inspire young people.” In his
crazed world nothing has any validity unless it is endorsed by a “celeb”.
For him the pinnacle of human culture is to be found in the pelvic thrust of a
rock star. Half a century ago young people would be inspired by the very idea of
science. They would enter a long apprenticeship, knowing they would have to
strive and suffer to master the tools of their trade, such as differential and
integral calculus. Then, at last, they could appreciate the real beauty of their
subject. Modern kids understand this – you do not become a master of the skate
board without a history of cuts and bruises – but the establishment
educationalists feel the need to wrap everything up in a cloak of fun. When
everything is fun nothing is fun.

For the likes of Blair, life is just one of those so-called
reality TV shows. Celebs are created overnight just by virtue of gratuitous
publicity, not by arduous preparation. The country elects a leader who is
someone who has never run anything. He has not yet made those great mistakes in
life from which everyone learns, so he makes them while he is doing the most
important job of all.

There is another thing that occurs. Your bending author has
quoted the likes of Auden and Yeats in these pages and the related books. How
often do people like Michael Henderson
quote the likes of Boltzmann or Bernoulli?Furthermore
YBA is thoroughly familiar with the considerable contribution that David Beckham
has made to the beautiful game, though totally disdainful of the media
razzmatazz with which he has surrounded himself. Auden, Boltzmann and Beckham
have all greatly contributed to the culture by total dedication to their craft.
The difference is that Beckham and Blair have made themselves multimillionaires,
not by achievement but by hype.

12/11/06

Salt

One of the slides put up at that
Dorchester
talk read “Salt – the weirdest scare of all.” There is a substantial
scientific literature establishing that the only dangerous salt diet is a low
one, while the evidence offered by
the scaremongers is ludicrously inadequate. Yet they persist and have
successfully wooed our political masters, so now the bans are beginning. One
again the Telegraph is alone in
publishing a more truthful
account.

The weirdness of this campaign comes with the question cui
bono? OK, a professor and his mates get their names in the newspapers and
get to walk with ministers, but is it worth all that trouble? There is not even
any political correctness prestige, as there was the case with the tobacco
zealots, whom they seem so anxious to emulate, even down to the growing numbers
of imaginary corpses.

Your bending author gets a mention in the Telegraph
piece, but the affiliation ascribed is likely to offend statisticians at
Southampton
.

On the sixth day God created suckers

In January 2003 we
mentioned yet another free energy scam called Genesis World Energy. Readers of our
Forum will know that this story has at last reached its dénouement, with
the imprisonment of the perpetrator. Intrepid number watcher John
Lichtenstein has been following the case. We used to remark on the ready
supply of suckers, but now that most of the world appears to have fallen for the
global warming scare any such comment would seem to be inadequate.

John moves in distinguished circles. His co-contributor
appears to be the great-great-grandmother of the usurper of the English throne.

13/11/06

Tell
me the old, old story

You have to admire the chutzpah. It is the hoariest old
cliché in the annals of junk science, yet the professors of panic have
disinterred it, scarcely bothered to give it a polish, and presented it to the
hoards of lazy media types, who immediately give it front page treatment. Naturally,
the BBC give it full
coverage on all channels, but it is a disappointment that the Telegraph, so near of late to becoming an organ of truth, should put
it on the front
page.

Yes, they are still grovelling around in the world’s
largest data dredge,
the Harvard Nurses’ Health Study. They are still producing low levels of
significance, still aiming at the same old targets, yet going into finer and
finer detail. They now claim to distinguish between the effects of hamburgers
and salami. You don’t know whether to laugh or cry.

Your bending author, on recently experiencing the trials
and tribulations of a major crash on the desk-top PC, has been reminiscing on
computing long ago. That first experience of computing was on a Ferranti
Pegasus. The eighth of these to be made was delivered to Northampton
Polytechnic (later
City
University
) in 1957; so at the start of a research assistantship there in 1959 one had the
rather rare privilege of access to state of the art computing. Even graduate
electronic engineers were not entrusted with sole access to the machine and had
to have a mathematics lecturer sitting in.

The program was written as a series of numbers (unless you
used the autocode, which was easy, but made poor usage of the limited memory).
It was punched out on five-hole paper tape. First you had to load the secondary
boot strap, also on five-hole tape, by operating the primary bootstrap, a
rotating multi-way switch, which took the machine through the basic instructions
to read the bootstrap tape. It all
seemed rather miraculous at the time, though the power was considerable less
than a modern pocket calculator and the speed was about a millionth of that of a
modern PC.

The great merit, compared with modern times, was that you
had total control of the machine, with no operating system getting in the way.
If anything went wrong it was your fault.

When Pegasus retired a few years later, our research group
were allowed to turn it into a laboratory on line computer. We were able to make
some of the earliest demonstrations of real-time digital filtering, measurement
by correlation with pseudo-random stimuli and other unheard of techniques. In
its old age it became a bit unreliable, because the silver plated contacts did
not like the corrosive atmosphere of
London
at the time, and your bending author became a familiar sight haring up three
flights of the famous helical staircase hoping to get to the laboratory before
it stopped. When that happened you had to go down again and jiggle all the
circuit boards.

Things are different now. After the recent crash, it was
necessary to call in an expert (not in digital electronics but in Gatesian
psychology) to put the system together again. When things go wrong nowadays, as
often as not, it is due to some quirk in the operating system.

In those olden times you had to understand all the minutiae
of any process you were implementing, including computer models. Now you can
save a lot of time by trial and error and you can implement glib algorithms that
might or might not do what you think they do.

We have gained so much with the power of modern computers.
This piece was typed into a machine that has far more computing power than the
whole world had in 1960. But we have also lost something – the imposed rigour
that forced you to do it right.

We
have a citizenry which can be caricatured as being increasingly unwilling to be
governed but not yet capable of self-government," Mr Taylor told the
audience.

Like
"teenagers", people were demanding, but "conflicted" about
what they actually wanted, he argued.

They
wanted "sustainability", for example, but not higher fuel prices,
affordable homes for their children but not new housing developments in their
town or village.

This is the logical fallacy of the false
dilemma. They want sustainability because it had been advertised to them
unceasingly. They want affordable homes for their children without an explosion
of new housing developments. They cannot have both because the Government has
completely failed to moderate an unsustainable rate of unproductive immigration
and has refused to consult the electorate about it.

"What is the big
breakthrough, in terms of politics, on the web in the last few years? It's
basically blogs which are, generally speaking, hostile and, generally speaking,
basically see their job as every day exposing how venal, stupid, mendacious
politicians are.

Venal is
awarding yourselves huge rises in salaries, expenses and (above all) pensions at
the public cost, while standing by as the Chancellor steals everyone else’s.

Stupid is
writing this sort of stuff and expecting to get away with it. They could before
blogging. Stupid is caricaturing the electorate as recalcitrant teenagers, who
are not capable of self-government, because they refuse to be bamboozled by this
sort of hogwash.

Mendacious is
fabricating reports on WMD from nothing and, for that matter, almost everything
else our Great Leader tells us. Mendacious is putting up a defence for policies
as though they were your own, when they have been imposed by the unelected EU
Commission, because you have surrendered the powers of our elected Parliament.

Whether media was left wing
or right wing, the message was always that "leaders are out there to shaft
you".

Can’t argue with that. They are and they have done,
incessantly. Media is a plural noun.

"It seems to me this is
something which is worth calling a crisis."

Can’t argue with that, either.

"I
want people to have more power, but I want them to have more power in the
context of a more mature discourse about the responsibilities of government and
the responsibilities of citizens," Mr Taylor told delegates.

i.e.
doing what they are told.

Technology
should be used to encourage elected representatives to communicate better with
voters, he told delegates.

He is leaving
Downing Street
next week, after three years, to become the chief executive of the Royal
Society for the Encouragement of Arts (RSA).

Poor old RSA! Your bending author gave up his other
fellowships for economic reasons, but kept this one out of sentiment. Now it has
fallen prey to the religious maniacs of
the eco-theocratic movement.

Heaven help us!

16/11/06

Al the
Obscure

The
riposte to the Monckton articles on global warming by Al Gore contains a lot
of verbiage and not much evidence. Politicians will love it, but some of us
simpletons will be confused. Number Watch has had access to the
super-computer at the Metropolitan University of Nether Wallop to provide a
translation of some of the more difficult passages.

As written

Translation

At stake is nothing less than the survival of human civilisation

One
day Chicken Little was walking in the woods when -- KERPLUNK -- an acorn
fell on her head

"Oh
my goodness!" said Chicken Little. "The sky is falling! I must
go and tell the king."

To begin with, there is a reason why new scientific
research is peer-reviewed and then published in journals such as Science,
Nature, and the Geophysical Research Letters, rather than the broadsheets.
The process is designed to ensure that trained scientists review the
framing of the questions that are asked, the research and methodologies
used to pursue the answers offered and even, in some cases, to monitor the
funding of the laboratories — all in order to ensure that errors and
biases are detected and corrected before reaching the public.

Only trust journals with editors of impeccable Green
credentials and a track record of suppressing politically incorrect
submissions.

If this were true, the entire global scientific
community would owe Monckton a deep debt of gratitude for cleverly
discovering a gross and elementary mistake that had somehow escaped the
attention of all the leading experts in the field. But, again, this charge
is also completely wrong, and it appears in this case to spring from the
Viscount's failure to understand that these complex, carefully constructed
super-computer climate models not only have built into them the physical
law he thinks that he has discovered is missing, but also many others that
he doesn't mention, including the fundamentally important responses of
water vapour, ice and clouds that act to increase the effects of extra
carbon dioxide.

And, despite Viscount Monckton's recycled claims about
the so-called "hockey stick" graph (an old and worn-out hobby
horse of the pollution lobby in the
US
), this faux controversy has long since been thoroughly debunked. The
global-warming deniers in the US were so enthusiastic about this
particular canard that our National Academy of Sciences eventually put
together a formal panel, comprised of a broad range of scientists,
including some of the most sceptical, which vindicated the main findings
embodied in the "hockey stick" and definitely rejected the
claims that Monckton is now recycling for British readers.

Art, history, archaeology, entomology and many other
disciplines are still all wrong – the Mediaeval Warm Period and the
Little Ice Age never happened. Those courageous Canadians, the McCritics,
never happened; they never published in peer-reviewed journals and have
been consigned to the dustbin of science as cranks. The US House
Committee on Energy and Commerce and Dr Edward Wegman, Professor of
Statistics at
George
Mason
University
, who chairs the National Academy of Sciences’ (NAS) Committee on
Applied and Theoretical Statistics, also never happened.

Scientists have also carefully examined the real-world
evidence (temperature change as measured by air balloons, ground and
satellite measurements, proxies like ice cores and tree rings, for
example) and have found that the models do indeed match the observations.

Fortunately, the models have so many disposable
parameters that they are infinitely tunable to match any available data.

Scientists will continue to pose questions and answer
them in the peer-reviewed literature — and I urge the public and policy
makers in Britain to rely upon the best advice from your premiere
institutions, ranging from the outstanding British Antarctic Survey, to
the Royal Society, the Met Office and the Hadley and Tyndall Centres for
the decisions that must be made.

Here is a partial list of institutions that have
succumbed to a Green coup.

And today, although there are differences between the
platforms, both of the
UK
's largest parties have issued strong statements about the need for action
— and your nation has largely avoided the partisan bickering and
downright denial that has stymied action in
America
. This bipartisan comity is essential to rise to the challenges presented
by such a complex problem as the climate crisis.

Spot the difference if you can, but in addition to
myself two of the greatest of modern physicists are the leaders of New
Labour and the symbol formerly known as the Conservative Party.

We have the opportunity here to avoid needlessly
bickering with one another on the editorial pages, and instead join
together to experience what very few generations in history have had the
privilege of knowing: a generational mission, a compelling moral purpose,
a shared and unifying cause, and an opportunity to work together to choose
a future for which our children will thank us instead of cursing our
failure to protect them against a clear and present danger with equally
clear and devastating future consequences.

Let us go back to the Inquisition, suppress the
heretics and save the people’s souls whether they want it or not.

By rising to meet this historic planetary emergency, we
have the opportunity to become not the selfish and self-destructive
generation, but the next Greatest Generation.

Then who should appear on the
path but sly old Foxy Woxy.

"Where are you going, my fine feathered friends?" asked Foxy
Woxy. He spoke in a polite manner, so as not to frighten them.

"The sky is falling!" cried Chicken Little. "We must
tell the king."

"I know a shortcut to the palace," said Foxy woxy sweetly.
"Come and follow me."

19/11/06

Gore style

The French poet and mathematician Raymond Quenaud wrote a
book called Exercices de style, in
which he retold the same trivial story 99 times in different styles. Each style
had a name, such as noble or operatic. Many years ago, long before
its decline, BBC radio produced a wonderful English version, which still stays
in the mind. After writing the piece above, your bending author spent a
sleepless night wondering what name you could give to the style of Big Al. It is
clearly something special when, for example, computer models become these complex, carefully constructed super-computer climate models.
Anyway, how does he know? Has he deconstructed the code? Euphuistic does not quite seem to fill the bill.

The result of all this cogitating is that the best
description of the Gore style is restaurant-modern,
as in the following example:

Reading, once one of the finest universities, is the latest
to set about closing
its Physics Department. An institution of higher education without Physics
and Mathematics has no right to call itself a University. As Blair’s
Britain
slides giggling into the morass of subculture that is exemplified by so-called
reality TV, the nation that once dominated the list of great inventions, the
Nobel prizes and almost every other measure of scientific achievement is bowing
out. The Great Leader, while continually mouthing his slogan “Education,
education, education!” with characteristic insouciance presides over the death
in his domain of the most fundamental of all sciences.

It is also a triumph for Thatcherism; Kenneth Baker made
the money follow the student and thereby turned higher education into a market.
National manpower planning was put into the hands of 17 year olds. The key
sentence in the BBC report is – He also highlighted the lack of demand for
physics courses. Why
should a student opt for a demanding course, when there are easy options that
produce a degree with hardly any effort at all? It is human nature to follow the
path of least resistance.

It is all summed up by that monstrously vacuous statement
by the Great Leader “We need celebrity scientists to inspire young people.”Even thirty year ago it was concepts such as “science” that inspired
young people, now it has to be “a celeb”.

If only there were a hint of hope!

20/11/06

At
home with the Blamerons

Drawn by Tilly.

Murdoch most foul

It is hard to find oneself in agreement with Richard
Branson, even if he can only bring himself to say it more than a decade too
late and then only when it affects his own business.

There is nothing like election
fever to produce a rash of dubious numbers, as Americans have recently
discovered.The Presidential
election generated a bigger electronic postbag at Number Watch than any
other topic, though it seemed politic largely to refrain from comment.

Now it is the turn of the British
to go through the trauma. Mind you, we have a much simpler and less stressful
system. We employ an individual to choose our governments for us, one Rupert
Murdoch. All we have to do in return is grant him a few monopolies and the right
to debauch our culture. He has now announced his choice in his Newsletter to the
nation (The Sun) and we are to have a further period of New Labour
government. So there will be plenty for Number Watch to write about in
the next few years.

Murdoch was granted The
Times as a reward for appointing Margaret Thatcher, as announced in the
notorious headline It was the Sun wot done it! Furthermore, a side effect of the
monetarist clampdown was to undermine the inchoate quality satellite service BSB
and let it be swallowed up by the tacky Sky.
The present political leaders now feel obliged to grovel to Murdoch whenever he
makes a progress through
Britain
. New Labour talked about “getting him on board”. He is now so powerful that
they dare not challenge his latest piece of effrontery. Not satisfied with a
total satellite monopoly and a dangerously large proportion of the newspaper
industry, he now has a finger in the terrestrial commercial TV pie, just enough
to prevent it reorganising itself to be able to compete for football franchises
and other areas of Murdoch near-monopoly.

22/11/06

Polly morphism

Under the Boy David, the symbol formerly known as the
Conservative Party has rapidly progressed from strange, through rather weird to
downright bizarre. The latest shock horror from its inner establishment is a
proposal to adopt as guru the notorious Polly Toynbee, the doyenne of DAISNAID.Number Watch has refrained fromcommenting on that lady’s excesses, as they are adequately covered by
the likes of the Tims (Worstall
and castellan), which is a bit
of luck as your bending author is close to the threshold of tolerance for the
amount of twaddle exposure in one day. Polly, almost uniquely, has a web
site devoted to her factual errors. The Proposal to adopt this hypocritical
champagne socialist had our
Boris somewhat bemused. Her writings, as opposed to her lifestyle, exemplify
everything the Conservative Party has always been opposed to.

The Telegraph,
following its brief flirtation with Big Al, is back on the truth jag. This time
it is Four
big fat Myths. If it goes on like this Scottish New Labour will be looking for
a way to ban it.

26/11/06

It’s
only weather

One swallow does not a summer make.
Aristotle

Simon Barnes in The
Times had a fit of the terrors on November
18th. It is odd
enough that a man who purports to be a nature watcher has never seen an out of
season butterfly, but even odder that he should react to the phenomenon as
though he had been attacked by a pterodactyl.

In the same issue of The
Times there was a photograph of autumn trees in Swaffham, with an
article suggesting that the autumn had only just started: this despite both
the Telegraph and the Mail having shown the traditional pictures from Stourhead on the
second day of the month. The Times
never gives up on its ratchet reporting of the weather and it is a rare edition
that does not have a bit of weather propaganda somewhere. Your bending author
went out and took a photograph of the bole of that
tree on that same day, just to show that in the warm South West the fall was
already over.

There was an amusing letting-the-cat-out-of-the-bag in Gardeners’
World on BBC TV, which is normally a haven of global warming. The programme
was about roses and they had flashbacks to programmes earlier in the year. They
showed new beds of roses being planted in the winter and then the return to the
same site in June to see all the blooms. Unfortunately there weren’t any. As
reported in these pages, the first half of the year was unusually
cold. It was the year without a spring.
The media establishment are now trying to persuade us that this is going to be a
record warm year, just because we had an Indian summer. The first
law of journalism is operating at full spate.

Simon Barnes had an even weirder episode later in that
article. Not only is he worried about earlier springs, which in our case we did
not have, but he is horrified that the South Africans are going to upgrade an
airport, thus displacing millions of swallows. The reasoning is not entirely
clear. Is it that they need the airport buildings? If so, what did they do
before they were built (a short time ago in evolutionary terms)? Or is it that
South Africa
is such a small country that the area of an airport will rob it of enough space
for swallows to thrive? The eco-theologues have a logic of their own that is
hard for one with a simple scientific training to follow, but they seem to be
able to start an argument from any given point and always end up with
catastrophe.

Anyway, we have had a bit of weather this month in
England
. This is a shock to the media, for whom weather always comes as a surprise and
presages disaster. Here is a picture from your bending author’s back garden on
November 25th.

It has never been under water before. Obviously it is all
caused by global warming and we are all doomed. On the other hand, it could be
just a rainstorm of an intensity rarely seen outside the tropics, but which has
a return period in the
UK
of the order of ten years.

Footnote: Just in case amnesiac readers did not get
the message, arch propagandist Paul Simons took it up the next
day. He evidently lives in a different country from your bending author and
correspondents to Number Watch and our Forum.
Note that the tree reflected in the above photograph was completely bereft of
leaves on the 25th.

29/11/06

Number
of the month – 50,000

It is only right that the man of the month should produce
the number of the month. Yes, it’s Big Al and this is the number of his DVDs
that he cannot give away. What
a pleasant change to have some cheering news on the climate front! The immediate
response from the alarmist community is – wait for it – a conspiracy theory.
This involves, of course, Exxon Mobil, so the Big Fight is between Big Al and
Big Oil.

Meanwhile, here is some helpful
advice on what to do with the unwanted discs, spotted by number watcher
Chuck Redman.